Dateline: SAN FRANCISCO
The emptiness of defeat is always filled with promises.
“We will be back,” said Bears’ coach Mike Ditka, and it sounded more like an order than a wish.
The Bears will be back.
“We have touched the future,” said linebacker Mike Singletary.
The Bears will be back.
“We’ve come so far,” said defensive tackle Dan Hampton. “We won our division, we beat a good Washington team and we played with the 49ers for three quarters. There is no way that this team can really worry about not being back next year.”
The Bears will be back.
THERE IS KIND of a double promise in that because, except to the most sympathetically curious, the Bears were only half here Sunday, here in the home of one of the two best teams in paid football, trying to grab the Super Bowl with one hand tied behind their backs.
Worse than that, the offense made the Bears look like an amputee.
“You can only put those guys (the defense) to the test so many times,” Ditka said. “It has to catch up with you.”
“The offense didn’t give them any help,” said quarterback Steve Fuller. “All we did was put them in bad situations over and over and over.”
“We really needed something from our offense,” said safety Gary Fencik. “They had a tough day and couldn’t generate any points. I thought if we could have just gotten one touchdown in the third quarter, we would have them on edge and guessing, but we never got in that position.”
“If you don’t score any points,” Hampton said, “you can only tie. You cannot win.”
THE BEARS WILL be back.
They will be back if Jim McMahon is healthier and wiser, if they can find a pass catcher with both feet and fingers, if Walter Payton can stay as young as he has, if their offensive game plan stops showing the imagination of preschool finger painting.
If the offensive line can become dependable. If the Bears don’t run into too many more defenses as fierce and as accomplished as their own, which San Francisco’s could very well be.
“Cripes,” said defensive tackle Steve McMichael. “Everybody talks about our pass rush. Did you get a look at theirs?”
Fuller did. He was sacked eight times by the 49ers’ pass rush, which was in its way a kindness to the frail young fill-in on whom so much depended. Fuller would otherwise have waffled passes into danger even more often than he did and would have been without alibi, save possibly temporary blindness.
THE BEARS WILL be back.
Who can believe they will not? To do as much as they did with so mismatched a mix, like Quakers living with Vandals, the Bears can only be encouraged.
“I don’t think I can put it in a nutshell,” said tackle Jimbo Covert. “San Francisco played better than us.”
Which is, of course, as neatly packed a nutshell as you would want.
“We have no excuses,” Ditka said. “We were beaten soundly by a good football team. I am disappointed for the players and for the fans in Chicago. I apologize to the fans and the team.”
No need. The world beyond the Midwest is just as happy with the Super Bowl it got, Miami against San Francisco. The match-up gives the ultimate game an authenticity that neither the Bears nor Steelers could have brought to it, and it confirms a football truth: You need both an offense and a defense to win it all.
“WE ARE THE NFC champions,” said 49ers’ coach Bill Walsh. “I don’t think there is any denying it. We took our end of the NFL and there is no doubt that the two best teams will be playing in the Super Bowl.”
“The 49ers are a great offensive team and a good defensive team,” Singletary said. “You don’t often find that combination.
“We learned what Buddy (Ryan) told us yesterday: You can play good defense and still go home.”
But the Bears will be back.
This was not so much a season as an appetizer, and the final judgment must be made not in the satisfaction of the Bears having done more than was expected but from the disappointment of doing less than was possible.
“This is a real downer,” Covert said. “A lot of people didn’t even give us much chance of winning the division, and we were one game from the Super Bowl. But no one in this room is satisfied. We are a young team. We will be back.”
THE SENSE OF unfinished business will linger, and not just because the Bears’ last brawl of the season ended with two seconds on the clock and Chicago with the ball, but because the Bears want to remember how far away coming close can be.
In the last moments, the 49er fans behind the Chicago bench were gleefully ragging the beaten Bears, showing no respect even for Payton, who sat, as usual, alone on the far end of the bench, staring into his hands and cracking his knuckles.
“Teddy Bears!” they yelled, waving a stuffed toy on the end of a noose. “Cubbies!” they yelled, dredging up a dual insult.
“Super Bowl! Super Bowl!” they yelled.
Singletary finally turned to face the happy tormentors and shook his fist.
“We will be back!” he yelled.
Truth can be born in anger. PHOTO: Walter Payton, who came within one game of the Super Bowl in his 10th year as a pro, realizes he must wait ’til next year. AP Laserphoto.